The following relates to managing projects and/or portfolios of projects. It finds particular application to business methods that facilitate managing projects and/or portfolios of projects throughout the life cycle of the projects as value flowing through a workflow pipeline.
Selecting and evaluating research projects, the ultimate value of which can only be established in the distant future after factoring in the contributions of others, are classic problems in portfolio analysis. Traditionally, phase-gate based product development techniques have been used to model project flow. With a typical phase-gate based technique, each project is defined through its activities and evaluated through the completion of a one or more of the project activities at each phase gate. Conventionally, phase-gate based techniques are executed as open loop processes without explicit feedback.
Real options analyses have been used to estimate the value of individual research and development projects. Such estimates are often used in the selection of projects, but have not been deployed as an integral part of ongoing project management as projects traverse a phase gate development workflow pipeline. Conventional techniques for controlling the flow of activities through such pipeline are well developed. However, with research and development projects, such techniques typically are only applied in qualitative form to manage project activities, but not project value explicitly.
Research and development operations are, in effect, design factories for the future offerings of a firm. As such, the flow of projects through these organizations should be amenable to evaluation and control by the techniques of manufacturing systems engineering. Thus, what is needed are systems and methods that enable projects and/or portfolios of projects to be monitored and managed as flow of value down a workflow pipeline. Such systems and methods enable the assessment and management of the creation of value by research and development projects while they are being executed rather than ex post facto.